Golf Swing Transition Webinar

Webinar by Chuck Quinton covering the golf swing transition and how to improve your golf swing during the winter.

Golf Transition

                So one quick note here as we're getting ready to get started, there's 700 people registered for this.

                Obviously I can't answer 700,000 questions from you guys but I'm going to do my best. We've got about an hour here so what I'm going to do, I got a lot of great feedback from the Q&A survey, and there were two things that were really consistent. Now there were tons of great suggestions, I wish that, I can't get to them all right now but if you guys like this format, we'll keep doing these, so the two things that were the most common were the transition, which everybody struggles with and how to keep your swing really working during the winter, and those are two things that rotary swing is really, really at the top of the heap for, that we do really, really well. So those are two things that I want to make sure.

                Anyway, all right, so here's a few things that I want to talk about doing, the transition and with the how can I keep your swing lubed up during the winter. We'll try to cover both, and again, I'll keep trying to check everything here as I go back. So all right. Hands down, number one thing that every single amateur just destroys their golf swing with is the transition. And just for those of you who don't know, that aren't as technically swing minded as others, the transition is the change of direction from when your body and the club is going backwards to getting ready to come back down to strike the ball, and that's what we call the transition.

                Oh, I've got a little message here. Okay. The transition ...

                Is my swing like Will Norman?

                We'll come back to that. Okay?

                The transition is what makes everything work in the swing. When I say everything I literally mean every critical component which is having lag, leveraging the swing, the angle between your forearm and the shaft, club ed speed, tension, swing plane, swing path, all of that stuff is radically changed, depending on how you transition, good or bad.

                The key is understanding what causes you to have a really poor golf swing transition and then understanding how to fix it. And that's honestly it's really, really simple, but I'm going to go into a little bit more in depth because so many people struggle with it, I've got so many questions about it. So the number one thing that you do, I'm going to ask this question and give you guys a chance to answer it first.

                What is the first thing that starts the transition? So if you guys can pop it up in your chat here, I'm going to look for answers and see what we got.

                The first thing that you do to start your transition, what is it? Somebody answer for me. Anybody, Bueller. Come on, wait shift, thank you Champ, if I had a prize I would give it to you. The wait shift is what gets everything sequenced, and the golf swing at the end of the day is all about sequencing, so if you sequence correctly everything starts to fall into place, and if you don't sequence correctly then everything falls apart.

                Now with the transition, here is the number one thing that everybody does from the top, is when they go from here they start unwinding their shoulders either from pushing from this right leg, and we see the right heel go up in the air right away, this is what causes you to lose your posture or they start pushing from the right side of their body, and all of these things cause every single swing flaw that you ever have struggled with, and I mean everything.

                If you start pushing from the right side, look how steep the shaft is.  Look how it comes out over, starts getting vertical and goes past my right shoulder. Notice as I start pushing from the right side that I start losing my posture, losing my spining, I start moving my hips into the ball. I call this a puppy dog humping the fire hydrant. You don't want this move here.

                All of these things, swinging over the top, it's all caused by tension in the wrong place at the wrong time. And typically that's coming from your shoulders, your upper body, and typically your right shoulder, right arm. People just can't believe how relaxed relatively this side of your body needs to be at the top of your backswing in order for the swing to sequence correctly.

                It doesn't matter how hard you try or what you tell yourself, or how good your intentions are, if you have a lot of tension built up in the right side of your body, whether it be in your right leg, or your right hip, or your right shoulder, it will fire first, and it will cause all of the bad things that I just talked about. You'll throw the club away, you'll lose lag, you'll swing over the top, you'll swing across the ball, etc. All of that stuff is caused by tension.

                The first thing that you've got to figure out is where there's tension. So what I want you to do, and here standing in front of your computer I want you to get up and do this with me. I want you to go get in your set up, put your arms across your chest, and I want you to think about the move that I talked about a million times, taking that right shoulder and putting it behind your head. Just make a nice little turn.

                I want you to tell me what you feel in the right side of your body right now. Your right arm, your right tricep, your right shoulder, you probably don't feel anything, right? Because you didn't use that to do anything, you focused instead, if you've been watching the videos, using your torso to turn your body and your arm just stays really relaxed. This is what it should feel like at the top of your swing, that should be an [inaudible 00:05:52] for you. That's how little tension you should have in the right arm, right side of your body, right shoulder at the top of your swing.

                The difference is, when we grab a club, we want to start picking this thing up and swinging it around and force it to go where we want it to when in reality what you want to do is move your club with your body like you just did.  The whole back swing is no more complicated than what I just showed you here. If you can do this, you can swing like every great tour player on the planet. It's that simple. The problem comes when we start worrying about this little thing and start doing this, and moving it around all over the place.

                So if you focus on this, when you go to the top, you still want to feel that that right arm, that right shoulder has the same level of tension. Now of course, there will be a little bit more tension than when you're not moving it at all, because of course, some muscular effort's involved in helping the club swing up. But really what you want to try and use is momentum created by your body rotation to help swing the club up for you. You don't want to take the club and try to pick it up. If you have tension in your forearms, and your grip, and your shoulders, when you're setting up to the ball, that's a huge sign that your brain is getting ready to use your muscles way too early in the swing. And that's the problem. Instead of trying to use your body to move the club to start it back and feel like you're just turning your body, we all want to do this and pick up the club and get ready to slaughter that ball right away.

                So tension is the number one thing to circle back, long story here, to circle back to why you can't transition properly. Because if these muscles are loaded first, right from address, right from the takeaway, and then at the top of your swing, you're ready to tomahawk it, you'll never transition correctly. And so many golfers struggle with wait shift, they don't understand why, I'm giving you the answer, hint, hint, this is it. If you have tension here you'll never be able to shift your weight properly first, and if you do, you try to shift properly, but this is so tight and so ready to fire that what you'll have to do in order to shift your hips fast enough to outrun how quick your arms can move, you'll have to push really hard off the right leg, and as soon as you do that you'll lose your posture and everything else goes in the trash bucket.

                So in order to have a proper transition, and be able to shift your weight correctly, it all comes down to tension.  Where do, we got that, I still have tension, right? So where we do want tension is in our lower body. So when we go to the top instead of winding this up and feeling so tight, like you can't move at all that just needs to unwind, I want to feel that my lower body, specifically my left side, my left leg has got to move. So it's got to have a little tension in this left hip area so that it can move first.

                You put that together and you start getting tension in the right places, that is how you start transitioning correctly. That's how you shift your weight correctly.

                So if you struggle with your weight shift I guarantee you that you have too much tension in your arms, your shoulders, the right side of your body, etc, and all of that stuff has got to relax, and that is what allows you to make a proper transition.

                Now I'm going to check in to make sure that everybody is doing okay.

                Everything shows, so I get everybody is okay here for the most part. Some people here with some internet connection issues, but, so if you have any questions, now there's a questions and answers tab, if you have some questions on the transition now, I want to cover them now. So please post them in the questions and answers tab there and I'll do my best to answer everything I can.

                How about swinging thoughts to support this idea?

                Swing thoughts to me are a double edge sword. I'm not a big fan of swing thoughts but I'll do my best to answer that question. Your brain needs to be generally in your swing, in your trunk, in your lower body. So if you're focusing on moving this, your lower body, or excuse me, your upper body, will have to follow along because it's attached to your pelvis via your spine, and of course, all this connective tissue.

                So if your brain is always focusing down here, this stuff will have a chance to work out right. The problem is we all focus on this stuff up here, and so that's what tends to fire first, and we don't ever think about our lower body, so how would we ever get a chance to move correctly first. So to answer your question, as far as a swing thought, there's not one specific swing thought, swing thoughts are very subjective, everybody, there's no real rhyme or reasons per say to have some effective swing though. And to be honest with you, swing thoughts I call chopping wood, w-o-o-d. Swing thoughts are things that work only one day, and the reason is you're just constantly chasing after yourself.

                So really what you want to do is work on feeling what it is you're trying to do that you're struggling with. So if you're struggling with your weight shift, then the number one thing I'd be trying to focus on and feel is develop a sense of this, my upper body being relaxed while this is being ready to focus and move first, and I was trying to move my left knee just a little bit first, you get that first move to tilt, move my pelvis back over the left.

                So as far as a swing thought, you could take something from that, you could say, well I want to move my left knee first, it doesn't move a lot, it just moves into neutral joint alignment, back over my left ankle, but if you wanted to think of that, you'll notice that as I'm doing this my hips are starting to unwind, and shift back to the left, but my shoulders are still staying relatively shut, so that might be a good swing thought for you.

                What else have we got in here?

                David, does ten position at the top affect swinging path during transition, and how important would hand position be?

                It absolutely does, but again, this is where people ten to focus on the wrong thing. So that was a great question because it's a really common thing that people misunderstand. I'm going to give you an example of this as while it's incredibly important, it's less important than everybody tends to make you believe.

                What I mean by that is if you look at Jim Furyk at the top, where are his arms, right? Way up here somewhere. Now he doesn't swing down from there like every amateur typically would because if they did, they'd swing over the top and whack across the ball and slice it. So what does he do? From here he obviously shovels it out with a really big leg drive and really relaxed arms to allow his arms to come back to the inside and to his club. He actually creates a perfectly square path at impact.

                Now, obviously that's a really complex movement pattern, which is what all golf swing is, it's just a movement pattern. So while it still creates a good swing path at the end of the day, it's pretty complex to try to teach somebody how to do that.

                Now by the same token, you can swing really flat and still heave over the top, or come over, it all depends on how you sequence your body. Remember I said, everything comes down to sequencing. That's where you move from that's going to dictate what kind of golfer you are. So your hands could be really low, they could be really high and you could still figure out some sort of compensation to make it all work together.

                In an ideal world, RST is all about having the fewest moving parts literally humanly possible. That's why we looked at it from an anatomical perspective, we actually look at the joints, the body, the bones, and putting the arms in a position where if we just did nothing else but shift our weight, my club drops right down on the plane without me having to do this big loop or any of those things.

                The backswing position that we teach in the five minutes of perfect backswing video is why that arm position is where it is, why the hand position is where it is. So if you look at the five minutes to the perfect backswing video, it's specifically teaching you from a standing position, this is the drill that I'm doing in the video, won't get in depth about it, about exactly where your hands need to be so you don't have to add any compensations like that, so I hope that answers your question.

                Jack, would backing into the target with center of lower back stop over the top with the shoulders.

                I'm not sure I follow that one, Jack. If you could rephrased the question, I would appreciate it.

                Dennis - how do I do the transitional valve while still turning back. Great question, again it comes down to tension is how you're going to sequence your swing correctly. It will sequence correctly if you create tension in the right place at the right time. This is your brain's number one cue for how to start the downswing and start moving in the other direction is tension, muscular tension, think about this for a second. You don't have to understand the golf swing at the level that I do to understand how to fix your swing.

                If you lower a muscle and it's really tight, and you contract as hard as you can, what is the number one thing that your brain is trying to tell you to do?

                It wants you to release that tension. Your golf swing of course is exactly the same, it's just happening much quicker. But it's the same dynamics. So if you've got a ton of tension as you're going back and you're trying to start back the other way, you need to load the muscles that you want to be moving first, and the muscles that you don't want to be moving need to be relaxed.

                So in other words, the reason people don't get that little sequence of the upper body and the club still going back into the lower body starting to unwind a little bit before the upper body finishes it's turn is because this is really, really tight and it fires first. So again, it comes down to loading your muscles and creating tension in the right place at the right time.

                All right, any other questions here, so I see some question in the chat section and some in the QA section, so I'll try to go through both.

                How to stop taming the club on the inside, taking the club, I would assuming on the inside and stop rolling the wrists. I'm going to try and keep all of this stuff into the downswing transition stuff. Just to make it consistent, we'll do another webinar soon and it's going to be a takeaway one, I'll try to do a bunch of takeaway stuff, but I'm going to try to keep this consistent on the same thing, so if you want to have questions please post them more towards the idea of transition, and that kind of stuff.

                Okay, let me go back to the bottom of the list here, see what I can find. What about a squat as a trigger to start the transition? It's a good question. The squat is kind of like a graduate level move. It's incredibly powerful, it's very important but you don't necessarily have to do it that much in order to get the benefits from it. So I want to talk about what exactly that squat is for a moment, because it does have to do with the transition, and how and why you should use it. And when you're ready to implement this in your swing, what it's really going to do for you.

                The squat move, a lot of people, Stan Stevens was kind of famous for this, because he went to the top, and he had this bow legged look as he started his transition down and people never understood what that was really all about. That was a brilliant move. Tiger Woods sort of got famous for the same thing but not so much a bow legged move but an actual squat move.

                The squat move is creating tension. Remember what I said earlier that everything is about sequencing and tension, sequencing and tension. If you want to be able to use your legs on the downswing at impact, and want to generate power and leverage from the ground, you've got to activate them. So if I go down into impact, or excuse me, if I'm in the downswing and I'm like this like every typical amateur golfer, just my leg kind of straight, what can I do with my legs right now?  Nothing, right? Because my legs are fully extended, so these joints, unless I create an angle here there's nothing for me to do anything with these muscles, because they're already fully extended. Or in this case, relaxed.

                As I go and I start to squat down, now what I've done is created a potential energy. If I'm doing this during a transition move this allows me by the time I'm done creating tension and loading up these muscle fibers and my legs, as I get into the impact position I'm going to be facing up. So you'll notice, I'm kind of face down here, as I start doing my little squat move again, notice this doesn't have to be very exaggerated, it can be a small amount, we're just trying to load muscle fibers. So as I do this, and I'm in this position now, as I'm getting ready to come into impact, I'm going to start pushing this leg up, because I've got an angle here which is potential energy.

                As I push against the ground, my body is moving in what direction? It's moving up. What direction is the club supposed to be moving at this point? Down. Equal and opposites. So as I move my hip up and back, that forces the club to move down and out away from me. That's what I'm talking about when I say I've hit the ball with my legs, that's what we mean by that.

                In order for me to have this leverage, this potential energy in my lower body to be able to create this leverage and make the club go down and out while my hips go up and back, always moving in the opposite direction of the clubs, an RST mantra, so as we're trying to get the club to move this way, I'm going to get my body this way. In order to do that I need to have this squat element during the transition so that I load muscle fibers so that I can push up against the ground.

                Does that makes sense? Hopefully that answers your question, there. I'll try to dive in here and see if there are any more on that. Let's see.

                Now you guys have tricked me and you've moved all your questions to the other side. Okay, let me try to catch back up here. Let's see.

                Try to catch up, there's a lot of questions here, guys. I'm going to do my best, I promise, but.

                Shan, is shallowing the club a passive move related to weight shift rather than that active move?

                Abso-freaking-lutely. Your arms and hands are responding to what your lower body is telling them and making them do. So yes, 100%.

                Robert, my right elbow never seems to get out in front of the right side, always behind. You're pushing too hard from the right side of your body, plain and simple. If your right elbow is stuck like this at impact, it's because you're pushing from your right leg and your arms are stuck behind your body and they can't catch up. You have got to stop pushing from your right leg, that's a huge part of what we do when we're talking about the RC 5 Step videos is getting to move your body in the right sequence and from the correct side of your body.

                When do you consider the transition complete? That's an interesting question. I would say at the end of a squat move would probably be a good thing because I'm not got everything moving back the other direction, and the club should have changed directions by then, so once the club direction is changed and now moving the other way, transition is pretty much done.

                Do you have a tip about rolling wrists? That's more of a take away thing than I'm assuming, downswing impact thing. I want to still try and focus on downswing impact here.

                Brian, so assuming I'm one that is too tense in the shoulders on the top of the backswing, do I just try to relax more and tighten the left knee a bit more. More or less, yes, that's the big picture answer, right? It's obviously a lot simpler said than done. The key is getting your brain to go through enough exercises, enough repetitions to where your body is instinctively loading the right muscles first, and that takes a little bit of practice by doing these drills of focusing on turning and feeling the resistance and coil and tension in this part of the body, while learning to feel that it's okay to feel this relax.

                And that's a big transition mentally for a lot of golfers is to go to the top of their swing and feel like their arms really aren't doing anything. You're not going to be able to do that at first because you won't know how to hit the ball and generate any power there, and that's going to unfortunately always override our subconscious is always going to be like, well I'm at the top of my swing and I know you hit the ball really hard, and that will tend to override any good intentions you may have to use your lower body first.

                So it just takes a little bit of practice of going to the top and staying relaxed while having something active to do. If you start learning how to move your lower body first by weight shifting your weight and posting up and your brain is just focused on nothing but your hip movements and posting up on that left side, by the time you're done putting all of your mental energy into thinking about this, the club's already at impact and you didn't have to do anything with your arms. That's kind of the essence of the swing, is that when you're focusing on moving from this it takes so much mental energy at first that you won't have time to really think about your arms.

                So I always tell people to put their heads in their ass, it's a bad way of putting it, but it gives us an excuse for being men, typically. So if you think about your swing happening from here to here, basically, and you think about just what's happening here and you don't worry about what your arms and hands are doing, and just forget about them, give up control to gain control for a little bit. As you start coming down you'll realize by the time you get close enough, look where my hands are, I don't have to worry about my hands. It's just a little mental exercise to get over that first.

                How still should you hold your head in transition? Don't worry about it. As long as you're not pushing hard off the right side your head's not going to move out in front of the ball, so don't worry about your head. It's going to move a little bit, it's natural, don't sweat it.

                Carrie - so knee starts the transition to squat? Yeah, you can think of it like that. The knee, this little knee move, a lot of people get confused about it but I'm going to make it really simple for you to understand why I use this as a teaching tool. If you were to throw a ball or a sphere or something, a rock. What would be the first thing that you would do? Well the first thing you would do is you would actually shift our weight all the way to the right side. If you're a right handed thrower. Then we would rotate on this hip, and then we'd get ready to stride and that's where the first thing to move would be, you externally rotate your leg while taking a stride to move and orient your pelvis in the direction that you're going to move or orientate this object. It's the most efficient way that man can figure out how to propel something when we were hunting for food or throwing baseballs.

                This movement is the same thing you do in a golf swing, the only difference is you just can't take a step. I guess you can technically, we've done that before. It's a good drill to exercise to take a step to get you used to shifting your weight but the same thing is happening we're coiled up just like we're throwing the ball and now we're just moving this knee to help externally rotate to get the weight and the hips rotating and moving in the other direction, without thinking about it.

                Jan, I've heard the term closed hip slide, what is that? Is this a good move or a bad move? It's a bad move. A closed hip slide, when we go back, and we take our movement to the top your hips are going to turn about 45 degrees, so this is square, parallel to the target line. They're now 45 degrees closed to the target. What people tend to do is push off their right leg in order to shift their weight. Now how much did my hips rotate? Really not much at all. This didn't help me at all because now I haven't turned my hips. My hip rotation is what turns my upper body in the downswing, and that's what moves the arms and the club back to the ball.

                When you do this closed hip slide, all you're doing is shifting your weight, which I'll give you an A for effort, that's a good start, but you've also got to be unwinding your hips to get them turned enough to bring your shoulders back to square. So closed hip slide, no bueno.

                Do you prorate your wrist at impact? I find it hard. Yes but again, I want to try to focus more on transition stuff, not seeing how you guys are tricking me putting questions both on both sides again. So, I'll catch the top one here.

                Can you clarify posting up on downswing, are you straightening your lead leg? Yes, you are straightening your lead leg and it's not straight at impact. It is straightening so you can still deliver force during this track, so yes you are definitely straightening your lead leg. One of the biggest mistakes that a lot of golfers make is they come into impact like this. Not only is their knee out past their ankle, which puts it in a very susceptible position for injury, but there's no power in this. This is not a powerful position.

                Power is created primarily by leverage in the swing. Leverage is taking an angle and then reducing that angle. So as I'm pushing against the ground I'm using the ground for force to help move my body up in order to help move the club down.

                So let's see, see if I can scroll back through some of these. Pat, should I post up before moving my trail foot? If I understand your question correctly, I try to make all my students keep their right foot on the ground if they have a problem with pushing and turning it up really early, until the ball is long gone. At least until the hands are back at 3 o'clock on the other side. So if you're here, I'll let your foot come up, but before this, there's no real reason for it. If you do, if your right heel is coming up in the air, it's because you're moving it and you shouldn't' be moving like that from the right side at all at this point in the swing, or you're turning too much and that's either caused because your shoulders are turning a lot or because you're pushing off this right leg too much, but if you're moving correctly from the left side, moving as hard as I can, that's as far as I can open my hips moving from the left side of my body, my right heel is still on the ground.

                All right, what else do we got. Is the feel of the transition like John Wayne riding a horse? God, I wish I knew what that meant, because that is pretty cool but I have no idea what John Wayne riding a horse feels like, but if you redefine that question I'm going to take a stab at it because I like that analogy.

                Okay. Go back over to the Q&A section. Can you explain how the downcock figures into the transition? Exactly. If you go to the top of your swing and you're getting ready to transition back to the left, what should your wrist be doing at that stage in the swing? So to clarify I'm moving from the top of my swing, what should my wrist be doing here? Nothing. They should be responding to the mass of the club head swinging, which is being swung by the rotation of my body. As my body creates this initial momentum for the club, my arms just kind of following along. The club's going to feel heavy if I don't let my wrists out at all, so my wrists are responding to the weight of the club. Now as the club begins to move this way, guess what it's going to do to my wrists if my wrists are soft, it's going to set them. If my wrists are up here, the club now feels heavy. So as I go back, and now I start to transition the other way, the falling mass of the club head and my wrists being soft and being drug back the other way by my rotating hips will make the club down cock, and that's how you create a down cock. There's nothing active about it.

                The last thing on earth you'd ever want to do is try and set your wrist in the downswing. Down cock is a total natural thing, but sometimes for people who have really, really bad habits of throwing the club, or their wrists are too tight, I'll make them do some drills exaggerating that down cock motion, but that's totally passive. 

                So let's see if I can find some more questions in here. In transition my right elbow is at 45 degrees, I know it should be vertical but I can't get it there. So, Bill, I think I understand your question, let me ready it one more time, at 45 degrees, I know it should be vertical. So I'm assuming you're talking about this position and your elbow is like this. So if that's what you mean, then there's typically what causes is just not enough external rotation in the arm. But it's not likely, because pretty much everybody can stick their arm up like this. This would be effectively a little bit tilted over, depending on what your spine angle is, but if you have that much external rotation in your right elbow, it's enough. If your elbow is really bad like this, that's because you've pushed your left arm really hard across your body. But if it's a little bit out like this, it's perfectly okay. Again, your arms should be a little bit relaxed at this stage, so they're just going to start to fall back in front of your body, shouldn't be a problem.

                Let's see, if I get my hands and arms too far behind me at the top, how does that affect the transition?

                It's going to make it suck, Rob, because your arms are going to get stuck behind your body. So what happens when you make your arms swing really deep like this because you've over used your arms, what have you done? What have you told your brain? Think about that for a second, you've taken your arms and club and pulled them really deep. There's a consequence for every move that you do in a swing. The consequence here is that you've really stretched this whole left shoulder girdle because it's being pulled deep across your body.

                Guess where the tension in your body is now? This is maxed out, you can't move any further than this, so your brain is saying, hey I guess he wants to use this first to start the downswing. Same thing with your right arm, some people do it like this, it's loading up this right pec to get into a position where it really can push and be powerful. If you swing your arms too deep you're overusing your arms and nothing will sequence correctly unless you put together a really clever set of compensations in order to put it all back together. So the key is keeping your arms out of the swing in that part of the swing. That's enough to really do much. Just let them child out and really focus on using your body to turn back, then your arms can chill out and stay in front of your body. It makes a golf swing a million times easier.

                Alright. How do I move my hips forward without spinning or sliding them? Move from the left side light, that's covered in the videos. So any time we're talking about transition videos, downswing videos, weight shift videos, all that stuff that's covered on the site. If you're spinning or sliding it's only going to come from one place, and that's pushing from this right leg. As soon as you take that out, you can't spin you can't slide. You move from the left side of your body, the left side of your body, if you pull from your left abductor as hard as you can, it can only pull you in a neutral join line. That's the beauty of it. When you move from the correct side of your body, everything falls into place for you.

                Let's see, trying to go back through some of these other ones because you guys ar crushing me here. You dismissed closed hips downswing, but if your hips start to early to turn will not not resort in over the top? It wouldn't necessarily result in over the top, but it can. That's pretty common. Especially for amateur golfers but if you start too early would that resolve in over the top.

                The key again is where you move from. If you move from the left side of your body, assuming you're a right handed golfer playing from the left side of the ball with right handed golf clubs, if you move from this side, I'm going to turn as hard as I can. Well my hips can only get 45 degrees open, I can't get any more open than this. So it's impossible for me to come over the top unless I do something with my arms, but assuming my arms are chilled out and nice and relaxed at the top, now I move just from the left side, it's not possible for me to come over the top. The only way to come over the top is pushing from the right side, heaving from the right side of your body.

                Dwight, inside muscles of your thigh is here, so think of the really odd exercise at the gym where you squeeze your legs together, and I like to help people feel this at the golf course is I have them take their left foot, stick it on the ground, put all of your weight on the right side, and drag your left foot over, and you'll feel these muscles activate, those are the same muscles that you use to help pull you over to the left side.

                Let's see. How do I move my hips forward without spinning or sliding them. I think I answered that one, yeah, I think so.

                Okay, my transition is too quick and I'm hitting from the top, how do I slow down the transition? Okay, I'll take that one on, again, tension, tension, tension, where the tension is is going to dictate where you sequence and how you're going to sequence your downswing, but some of you guys are at training edge, and you've seen this floppy golf club that I have here. I'm not a big fan of training aids, as you guys probably know, I'm a fan of teaching you how to do everything correctly with your body, but some training aids have some value in life, and I used to really use a lot, a thing called a whippy tempo master, I'm sure you guys have seen it. But it was basically like this but it had an insanely whippy shaft. And it was so whippy that it was kind of not really useful in real world applica. You usually had to swing so slow and so smooth with your tempo that it was just not, it didn't' replicate what a real swing was like.

                So recently somebody from the UK sent me these and they're called g-force, and what I'm going to, we have a link to them on the website. We just put it on today for you guys. So I'll put a link up on the webinar here in a second, but basically what it is, it's like a whippy tempo master on steroids. So it's a much thicker shaft so it's not so whippy. You can thin the whippy tempo master in half, basically.

                So in order to be smooth, if you like training aids, then rather than just focusing on keeping your body soft these are really cool, because if you get a little quick, especially when you're in the transitions, I know when you're in the take away, excuse me, some of you guys asked about how to stop rolling your wrist, this exaggerates all these movements so helps you feel them a lot easier. So as you go to the top and you start swinging really hard from the top you can see this thing's really going to get my attention here.

                So if I go to the top, and swing nice and smooth and keep my stuff sequenced correctly, is that I'm trying to tension with my hand, and my hands are nice and relaxed, and as long as I let everything go nice and soft. I'll feel the club set and bend and stress the shaft, and then I'm going to maintain that all the way down to impact and I'll help feel that lag.

                So I'll put that up there real quick so you guys, you big training aid nuts out there, you'll be able to get access to that on the site. So see if this shows up, I think we might have put this on sale for you guys who are attending the clinic. All right, so it's on sale for an hour I believe. So you should see that here, so if you like that kind of stuff and you like real training, you can actually hit balls with this, which is actually pretty cool, but it really will force you to smooth out your transitions.

                Now, at the end of the day, training aids are not the answer. The answer is using your body correctly. Using the training aid, what are you going to do? But that doesn't mean you can't use a training aid with this along with using your body correctly as you're working them together to help accelerate the learning process, because this will instantly, as soon as you start throwing it, it's going to feel terrible because the shaft bends on the other direction. So anyway, hopefully that helps.

                How is this different from the orange whip? It's way freaking cheaper, no offense to the orange whip guys. The orange whip's great, but it's just too dag gum expensive for something that you can't hit a golf ball with. And I've had numerous discussions with them, they've had numerous people tell them the same thing, but they sell a ton of them, so they're in business to make money, I get it. I think they could sell a lot more if they were cheaper. This is like forty bucks cheaper and you can hit balls with it, so it's kind of a no-brainer.

                And, really cool about this, this is a wedge but they actually have a wedge and a seven iron, so I really, in my chipping stuff, I am a big proponent of using your body, especially your lower body in chip shots, and so that allows you to keep your hands in reserve and keep them really soft in order to manipulate the club face a little bit, so if you want to put a little hook spin on one, to get it to roll up a second tier. You want to pull that off a little bit, keeping your hands really soft gives you a great touch around the grain. So that's what I've been using this a lot for, is hitting little chip shots with it, because then it helps smooth out my pitching.

                So they made a seven iron and a pitching wedge, this is a 54 degree, so it's really cool for that, and so the big difference between that and the orange whip? You can hit balls with it. And it's way cheaper.

                Let's see, let's see if I can get back to where I was. Can you discuss driver transition vs. iron, its' the same. The golf swing is all about movement patterns, so whether you're hitting a wedge, a seven iron, a two iron, a driver, it's all exactly the same, the only difference is the timing of it is a little bit different because you've got, and of course, I swing with my posture, but the sequence that you're moving your body, your weight shift, etc. All of that stuff is exactly the same, it never changes. You don't want to try to learn 13 different golf swings. You want to learn one golf swing which is all about moving your body correctly and that would get everything falling in sequence for you. So they're the same.

                How do I get rid of the gremlin that jumps on my shoulders at the top of my swing and tells me to hurry. Phil, you can hurry if you use your lower body. If you want to smash the ball, trust me, I love smashing the ball, it's all about moving your trunk first. This is the biggest bone structure in your body, your pelvis, so if you move this fast it's pretty hard to do so you've got to be a little bit patient because you've got to give this time to shift back over, it can't move nearly as fast as your wrists and hands and stuff can.

                So if you're going to move fast, you want to hit the ball hard, I'm all for it, I love crushing it. It's all about getting this to move fast, and then don't worry about this. Let this follow along and then everything will start to fall into place.

                How important is keeping the weight on the ankles throughout the swing? And would it make easier for transition focusing on the left ankle to shift your weight to starting? That's a good question. First of all, let me be clear about something. For those of you, I think a lot, and I know you guys are premium members so there's a lot of stuff that's covered on this site, there's 300 and something, maybe 4 or 500 videos on there now. So there's a lot of stuff that's all covered on here so I won't go super in depth on this, but the weight moves in a circle 8 pattern in the swing. It doesn't just move laterally from your ankle to your ankle. You go at address, when I go back the weight's actually moving further back and it's going to move a little bit at the ball of your foot, at the top of your swing, now the weight's going to move back to my ankle and it's going to move onto the ball of my right foot.

                So it moves in this figure eight pattern, but if you like to think about, I like to use something that I'll often times, I'll stick a tee or something under my students foot and let them lift their left heel at the top of the backswing a little bit, and then tell them to smash it down in and that helps them focus on getting the lower body in the left side of weight to help move their weight back to the left. So that's a good way to think about it, if you think about using the left side.

                Let's see. Try to catch up here. Dave, looking for some tips, got a sales pitch? Sorry Dave, what did I miss here? I'm pretty much the anti sales guy, so if I could help you I definitely will. All right, any, let me see any other questions.

                Trying to catch up with them here but I got a little overwhelmed with them for a second. No other questions in the Q&A section? Can you practice the transition weight shift in slow motion, or does it have to be done at a real speed? That's a great question. Gary, it needs to be both. This is a huge mistake that some of my students make. You have to start slow at first, or you'll just never get it. You'll keep repeating the same movement patterns because your brain is really lazy, and it likes to do the stuff that you're already good at over, and over, and over again.

                If you are struggling with this stuff, and you can't get to transition correctly, the obvious answer, which should be obvious but we don't always realize it this way, is that you should just slow down. How slow should you go? Slow enough that you can do the movement exactly right. And that's the speed that your brain can keep up right now, so if that's really, really syrupy slow, that's just the speed that you need to go right now. But that doesn't mean that you stay at that speed forever.

                In fact, what you've got to do, is begin to challenge your brain. Once you can do the movement correctly at a certain speed, slowly start ramping up that speed until you can do it at real speed. And the same thing with a club, everything in RST is all about stacking and sequencing. So if you're working on your transition, guess what I'm going to make you do? Take your arms out of it, you don't need them right now. You're never going to learn a proper transition if you're worried about swinging your arms, and positioning your wrists at the top, then you'll club face, how much lag you're going to create. It'll never work. Nobody's brain can keep up with all that crap.

                I'm going to take your arms out of it, and then I'm going to have you focus on, remember put your head back in your ass and focus on your lower body. And if this is the speed that you can go, then that's the speed to work at. I see that the next time, if you're at home, doing these drills on your own, then you're goin to start to speed it up a little bit, and speed it up a little bit, and so on. And once I can do it with speed I stack another piece on there to challenge my brain, which might be speed, I might keep ramping it up, or I might put one arm up there. Now I'm going to focus on the same thing, and you'll get the RST 5 steps stuff, that's exactly the sequence that we go through.  Take your arms out of it, focus on your lower body. Once your lower body is working correctly then we're going to add another piece, we'll add that left arm, we'll add the club, so on and so forth.

                First of all, go as slow as you need to to get the movement right. Add challenge to it by adding speed, stacking complex pieces on it, and as you keep going that's how you learn. The reality is, the problem is people want to take something that they learn as a quick tip, quick fix and go straight to the driving range and start smashing drivers. Some people do. I've given lessons where people have gone out and shot their best life and then around right after the lesson, and then I've had times where people don't. It's just the normal.

                You can think about it with some logic for a second. If you learned how to drive a car on manual transmission, which many of us old timers did. I'm forty now so I consider myself an old timer. I learned how to drive on a manual transmission, and in doing that I learned in a parking lot with no people around, nothing to hit, etc. And I'm sure you probably did some back country road, nobody around, because there were no distractions. You didn't do that at a race track. Nor did you learn how to drive in a parking lot and then instantly the next day go try and drive the Indy 500 you would have killed yourself and everybody around you. The golf swing is no different, learning is learning.

                So when you're working at a home, and you're doing your drills in front of your mirror, oh Chuck's focused on moving this knee, and get me posted up and get in this great impact position. Okay, let's go play tomorrow and I'm going to swing as hard as I can, how realistic is that? Nothing in your life have you ever learned like that? Nothing. At least not productively.

                If you actually want to learn the swing, which I'm assuming you do, then you've got to take the steps that are required to learn. Everybody has to go through the same stuff. The trick is, if you go a little bit slower at the beginning and get the fundamentals down. And really the RST 5 Step stuff, is 5 steps. If you go though those five steps, you're going to be hitting the ball the best you ever have, I guarantee it.

                But if you go really fast, and you skip the boring stuff up front, which is weight shift and transition and using your core and body rotation, and you go riding or whaling on the club, and down cocking and hitting the driver, it's going to take you ten times longer than it would if you just took a little bit of extra time and slowed down from the beginning to learn the fundamentals and get your body moving correctly.

                All right, I'm going to pick up some more questions. What three videos would you recommend on site on this topic of transition? The five step series, the RST five step stuff, is really the stuff that's going to be the quickest way to learn it. Everybody wants to learn stuff fast, and I've got a lot of videos on weight shift and transition, so if you just google, or search on the website for transition it will pop up. But I really recommend for the average guy who's really want to improve and get as good as they can, as quickly as they can, they go through the five step stuff, because it doesn't bog you down on all the details. There's tons of stuff that you could spend the rest of your life, and maybe people do, chasing, getting the club just perfect here and perfect there and it doesn't really make that big of a difference.

                If you're trying to just go out and play really good golf and become a really good ball striker focus on just the core of the five step stuff. Get set up correctly, rotate correctly, use your body correctly, learn how to use the lead side, learn how to take this right arm out of the picture, in the sequence that I stack it on, in that five step video, five step series, and that's really the core. And then once you do that you'll be so happy with your swing you'll want to go back and look at other details. I want to correct this, or I want to predispose myself to a draw or a fade, whatever it may be. But the five step stuff is really the, honestly it's 21 years of work of me teaching. I gave my first lesson when I was 19, so 21 years of trying to figure out how to make people improve as fast as humanly possible, and in doing that, still giving them the real core guts of what's really ...

                I'm not a tips teacher, I hate golf tips. I'm all about teaching you fundamentals based on science and fact, and that is what that five step stuff is bold. Everything I've done playing competitive golfer, 26 years, is what that's all about. So I can't make it any simpler than that really. That would be my video recommendation for you guys.

                Your clinics are always in Orlando. Do you go elsewhere ever?  I did one in California last year. I'm pretty much going to do them just in Florida this year. For a bunch of different reasons, so I pretty much am just doing them here. A lot of it has to do with the dreaded tax man, and everybody wanting to pay said income tax when you do a clinic somewhere else. So a whole other set of issues there.

                While we're in the process of learning five step, can we go play around. It can be confusing because we haven't really five stepped yet, and old habits will kick in of course, advice?  Yes, Julie, that's a great question. So here is the key with this stuff. I want you to go out and play. Golf is all about having fun. It's not about doing tons and tons and tons of work and drills. That's part of it, it's what's necessary for you to learn something that's very complex and very intricate and requires a tremendous amount of precision, which is what golf does. You have to be able to get the golf ball square on the club face with a square path, and there's just so many variables that go into it.

                If you're going to go out and play while you're practicing, here's what I recommend. Focus on one or two things and come hell or high water, you focus on that for all 18 holes. No matter what happens, you accept the consequences that if you're going to go out and play while you're trying to work on something in transition, that you may hit some goofy shots that you've never hit before, you'll also hit some great shots that you've never hit before, but it'll be up and down depending on the number of reps you've got in, and where your brains at, and what your focus level and commitment is to what it is you're working on. But nobody, now Tiger Woods, as he's proven very well, can focus on swing stuff and go out and play great golf. It's just too difficult. Your brain has so many things it's trying to do.

                So if you go out and play, pick up a sleeve and pinnacles and just go out and don't worry where the ball is going and most importantly don't use the ball flight as your judge of whether or not you did the movement correctly, because there's a million things that alter ball flight, and honestly fixing ball flight is the easiest thing in the world that any competent instructor can go and manipulate one way or another and change ball flight. So if you're really trying to fix fundamentals, what you judge your success on is not what the ball did, but did you do the movement correctly.

                Well how do I know if I did the movement correctly? By now if you're going to go out and try and take something that you're doing inside in front of a mirror and do it on the course you better know what it feels like when you do it correctly, or you've got no business being out there trying to do it. Right? You can't feel what you're doing on the course, you can't see it, so you have to do enough reps until you're like okay, I'm going to work on just this one move, and make it really simple when you're going out to play.

                So I'm going to say, I'm going to try to do my little squat transition. So what I'll do before every shot that I hit, I'll do a couple little drills to feel that before each ball, and then go and hit it, and if I hit a bad shot, it's okay. My marker of success is whether or not I feel like I did the shot correctly. Of course now, if you stick your handle out there in the video and see if you did it right or not.

                Let's see, what is the main cause for the right shoulder dropping and causing the full shot? Pushing from the right leg.

                Let's see, I'm hitting over thirty yards further, thank you. That was quick, Dave, it only took us fifty minutes, that's great.

                I've developed a pull with the irons, especially when I pull the club into the ball with the left arm.  If you're pulling it, there's a couple of things that are going on. Let's just assume some certain things here. Let's assume that you're transitioning correctly. I have to make an assumption. You may not be, and that could be causing the shot that's going on, but if you're pulling it with the club, I would look at. Oh fuck, there's so many things that could go wrong here. You could be over rotating your wrist by trying to actively do it and since you mentioned pulling with your left arm that's probably where I would go with it.

                That pulling motion is really subtle, it's not like you're trying to rip your arm down. The arm is getting pulled down by your transition, but the point is, this left arm has to be guiding the club on impact but it's not a very active pull. It should be pretty relaxed relatively. Because the majority of the work is being done by your trunk.

                So as you start down your left arm is just kind of guiding the club. Don't think about ripping it down because if you create a lot of tension there you might start over releasing the club and do a bunch of other goofy things, so that would be my guess there.

                All right, there's 200 people here trying to ask questions so I'm doing my best to try to get to all of them, but I'm definitely going to miss a bunch.

                Okay, Rob, does the shoulder glide bring along and activate the rest of the torso and the legs in the backswing? Shoulder glide bring along and active the rest of the torso? Ah, good question, Rob. So Rob's question, let me read it out loud in case you guys can't see it there.

                Does the shoulder glide bring along and activate the rest of the torso and the legs in the backswing? Yes and no. The first thing is in the real world where I'm talking about pulling this right shoulder blade back it's helping initiate a centered rotation but it's not the only thing that's moving. Really you're moving from your core and your obliques and your trunk. And that includes moving from your lower body a bit during the beginning. It's not just the shoulder blade, but I try to focus on that to make it really, really simple and to make sure that people learn how to pull instead of push during the backswing because of all the problems that creates. So if you focus on that while also feeling like you're using your legs to help you turn a little bit, it will help you activate them early so it's easier to get them activated in the downswing. So hopefully that answers that question. In a simple, quick ...

                How does posting up alter spining? Good question. It happens in 3D space, it's hard to describe in one angle here, so I'll do my best to quickly explain it. Then again, it's more of an impact thing so I'm going to go through it quickly because you're going to want to keep this stuff on transition elected, but as you're posting up and your chest is staying down, my spine is actually going to have some curvature in it, so when you look at it from this side, it's actually got what we call side bend. And that's how I keep, here's the thing you've got to think about, I had an old coach, many, many years ago when I was still playing professionally, giving me this analogy, so I'm going to borrow it from him.

                He told me to feel like I had a string tied to my shirt here on the ground and that string could never change, obviously it couldn't go up this way and I didn't want to go down, so I want to keep the string taut the whole time. Now it's over exaggeration, it's not realistic, but it'll help you feel, especially during this transition phase, instead of popping up like this, where the string would break, or going down way too far, if you imagine keeping that string at constant tension, kind of a good, simple way of thinking about, as long as you move your body correctly it'll help your spine move through the right sequence of movements without having to get too complicated with it.

                Does the body rotation slow or stop at any point to allow the club to release, or are you rotating at constant speed? It's slow to the point of almost stopping, that's how you release it. Your body must post up and this posting up motion decelerates the hips which allows all the energy to transfer up the chain. It's an absolutely, your hips have got to almost come to a stop or come to a stop and if you look at some golfers, you look at Rory McIlroy, for example, his hips actually go backwards as he's releasing the club, so yes, absolutely, the last thing you're going to want to do is just keep turning your hips and hitting there, you've got to post up.

                Okay. Does the navel move at the start of the backswing? Yeah, it does.

                What can I do to prevent fading the ball during transition? There's fifty thousand things that can cause a fade, so I'm going to, that would be a lot of difficult stuff there. So check.

                Did you have any questions sent earlier before you start? Yes, I did have a lot of questions and posts in there, so I didn't know, this is our first one here, so I appreciate you guys hanging in here with me, but I would love to get your feedback on this so please feel free to post them in here, and I'll definitely try to go back and re-read them. I do want to give you guys one more offer.

                Let's see if I can do this one here quick. So thanks for hanging in there with me, I want to give you one special deal that we have just for hanging in here for me, and being patient, that if you guys are interested in joining the site, and trying it out, learning a little bit more about RST, there's an offer on now, you should see on your screen for a buck. If you can't swing a buck to try RotarySwing now, I don't know what to tell you. If you don't like it, I'll give you your whole dollar back, I promise. But for three days, go back and watch all the videos this week, go and gorge on RotarySwing for the next three days, and see what you like.

                You'll see that everything that we do is based on a tremendous amount of work that I've put into studying the swing, that my team has put into studying the swing and understanding the biophysics and mechanics and physical anatomy of it. And for a dollar, it's pretty much tough to beat. So, please feel free to take advantage to that. It's a limited deal, I think there was a hundred offers on there, or actually 25. There's only 25 of them, and they're available for the next hour, so anyway, hopefully you guys found this productive, and like I said, if you have any other comments or things, please post them in here. I'll leave this open for a little bit so I can keep gathering all your questions and the chat stuff and I'll go back through and read them. So I've got homework tonight. And in the meantime, if you guys have any last question, I'll try to get to them really quick, we've got a few minutes left before we've got to close down here.

                Robert, you're welcome.

                Anything else?

                Nothing else? You're welcome guys, I appreciate it. Thanks for coming in. Do you subscribe to the two cheeks theory? No. Simple answer. If you're going to use your hips without open them you're going to push too far off of the right side.

                What about training over the winter? There's a whole winter series on the site, it's literally called the winter golf training program, so that would be a good dollar investment for you Brian, is focus on doing the stuff that's in there. You can do all of the stuff on the site, all of the RST 5 step, all of the videos, all of the winter golf training stuff is meant to be indoors. You don't have to be hitting balls, in fact I don't want you hitting balls, most of the time until you get enough reps in there. So please understand that. That is really the core essence of what RotarySwing is all about is teaching you how to move your body correctly which will in result move the club correctly.

                Anything else? You're welcome guys, thanks for reaching out, I appreciate it. You're welcome, thank you.

                Are you posting this anywhere for review?

                Yes, there should be a link sent out afterwards that will allow you to watch this webinar again. If not I will have a copy of it, and I'll email it out to you guys next week. So if you missed anything, I know I missed a bunch of stuff so I will try my best to try and get back to some of these questions.

                So you guys are welcome, appreciate it. Thanks for saying thank you. Anything else out there?

                Tell them about the swing analysis.

                Yes, thank you, Dave, I see it. The swing analysis, you know how you can purchase them individually, they're nine bucks each, the cheapest golf lesson that you're ever going to get, and these guys are all certified trained RST Pros, you don't have to be a premium member anywhere anymore now, so you can just, as a free member of the site you can just buy a swing review for nine bucks, and you get somebody to review your swing that's a certified RST instructor for nine bucks. It's a no brainer.

                Yes, I'm going to try to post this later. For you guys to review. Will the club offer come back on screen? You should see a tab on the right hand side of your webinar screen that says offers, I believe.

                Can you guys see all the offers, let me see if they're both on there. Nope.

                Okay, so for those of you the link to the, if you go to the store, so go to the website, go to RotarySwing.com, and on the top click golf training aids, and in there you'll see, once you go to golf training aids you'll see the G-Force wedge in there, and you'll be able to order it at that price for the next hour.

                So is there anything that you teach us that conflicts with Ben Hogan? A lot, probably. That's a whole other video series. We'll do that one later.

                Tom, you're welcome. Oscar, you're welcome. Let's see.

                All right, guys, so I'll leave this running up here for a little bit more so you can get the offers that are on here if you want, and if you guys hopefully can leave any other feedback for us, and we'll talk to you guys again soon, thanks so much.